September 16, 2017

Friday Night Movies 650

Tonight we watched films from two centuries that were 88 years apart in their making. First up was the Blu-ray of the newly restored The Lost World from 1925. It's got elements from 11 different sources to bring this new version to 110 minutes. The Image disc from 2001 was only 93 minutes and some previous versions have been as short as 64 minutes. You can read more about the various DVDs of the film here. The movie is in the public domain so there have been many DVDs, from a number of companies, over not that many years. The length of the various versions is from 64 minutes to 110. Quite a spread, huh. The movie is based on the Arthur Conan Doyle novel, Marion Fairfax wrote the screenplay and Harry O Hoyt is the director.

Wallace Beery is Professor Challenger, he'd been to the plateau with the living dinosaurs but no one believes him as he has no proof. He gets another expedition together, with the help of a newspaper, and returns to rescue Paula's father. Her father had been left behind during the earlier expedition. The second expedition gets to South America and camps a lot.

Months later they get to the plateau in Venezuela. They have to climb up the skinny bit, chop down a tree to make a bridge, then cross over to the plateau with all the prehistoric critters. Sounds like a video game. Of course they get trapped when a brontosaurus knocks the tree down. Now they have to keep out of the way of the meat eaters and try to get down off the plateau. Lucky for them they have a monkey with them.

They do manage to get to the end of the show with out most of them dying. In the mean time the brontosaurus has fallen off the plateau. It landed in the mud of the river and survived so they bring it to London with them.

It gets out of his cage during the unloading and takes in the sights of London. It falls through Tower Bridge and swims off down the Thames River. Challenger is sad to see him go but he's happy his proof broke a bunch of stuff.

It's a fun enough movie, though a bit slow. There are some nice dino moments by Willis O'Brien. He'd go onto doing King Kong in a few years. The quality of the film is pretty good for a film from that age, though you do see a lot of film damage on some of the bits from some sources. I doubt I'd bother with buying one but you never know it might fall into my hands sometime.

Our second movie also had a drooling creature in it, in The Lost World it's a Dryopithecus, in 13 Eerie it's a more modern zombie type. 13 Eerie is a 2013 Canadian horror film that was written by Christian Piers Betley and directed by Lowell Dean. I got it from Netflix because we had just seen his Wolf Cop movie and I was interested in his other films. It's Lowell's first film and the only one available at Netflix. Their DVD selection just hasn't been up to snuff lately. The death of the the DVD is going to be slow and painful. On the flipside, it's good for getting stuff cheaply.

The story is about a group of forensic students getting their final exam. The Professor has ditched 3 dead bodies, each in their separate area, and the pairs of students have to investigate what's done them in. Trouble is, there's a fourth dead body, and on top of that, it's alive. That's one of the dead bodies with Producer Roger Christian on the left and Director Dean Lowell on the right.

That's Katharine Isabelle smiling, she's one of the students sitting the exam. You might have seen her in the Ginger Snaps films as well as many other films and TV programs. Back in the movie, the dead have risen and people are getting attacked. There's plenty of running about and screaming. The gore is pretty good, some goopy and some grisly bits included. The characters are less hideous than a lot of horror films. It's the Professor and his bus driver that are the dumb asses here. The bitey zombies are OK, pretty aggressive and pretty chompy. I thought it was about average, a bit of enjoyable carnage, but not as good as his later film Wolf Cop. I wouldn't need a copy 13 Eerie but I'd pick it up if I saw it for a couple of bucks.